Tag: Harry Potter

Posted on
by

We caught the final Harry Potter movie on Sunday. It was an impressive finale to the series, and they clearly made the right decision in splitting the last book across two movies so they could actually put some weight behind the story instead of just running down the bullet points. That was one of the problems I had with the fifth and sixth films

Still, I’m most impressed that the movies finished, and didn’t stop partway through the series with dwindling budgets and audience interest. His Dark Materials couldn’t get past the first film, and based on the box office, it’s pretty clear that the current Narnia films aren’t going to continue beyond Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Eight movies over a decade, adapting a complete series, and going out with a bang? That’s an impressive feat right there!

Posted on
by

Have you ever run into a name that you can’t help associating with a completely different context? Like when people realize that one guy in Office Space is named Michael Bolton? Or when you look at “AD&D,” and instead of “Accidental Death and Dismemberment” your first thought is “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons?”

Yeah. Especially in IKEA.

For example, here we have Harry Potter’s favorite instructor in Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, magically transformed into a set of venetian blinds.

Lupin blinds

And here’s the thief who ends up as one of Blake’s 7 on the Liberator…as a set of sheets. (Nine of them, no doubt, to the wind.)

Vila sheets

And it’s not just IKEA. Robin of the Teen Titans has his criminal counterpart in this bottle of wine:

Red X Wine

Or the older daughter of Eddard Stark, playing music instead of the Game of Thrones.

Sansa MP3 Players

So, what good crossover names have you seen?

Posted on
by

I don’t understand the rage exploding over the Harry Potter delay. More precisely, I suppose I should say I don’t understand the depth of the rage.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was originally scheduled for November, but Warner Bros. has just decided to push it back to June for scheduling purposes.

Is it annoying? Yeah. Is it a personal affront? Not so much.

Maybe I’m jaded, having been through this with movies like Stardust and Serenity, not to mention Sci-Fi Channel’s insane scheduling system that basically treats each “season” as two 10-episode seasons and splits them across what might as well be two years…or, going further back, PTEN’s insistence on holding back the last 4 or 5 episodes of each Babylon 5 season until the following fall, every single year to the point where TNT, after picking up the final season, did the same thing. Pathology got postponed twice, then pulled off the schedule entirely before it finally hit theaters nearly a year after the original release date.

Or maybe it’s just that I like the Harry Potter books better than the movies.

It’s not like it’s been taken off the schedule indefinitely. It’ll still get a theatrical release. I can’t think of any at the moment, but I’ve had movies I really wanted to see get stuck on a shelf, finished, for years. Some of them eventually surfaced as direct-to-DVD releases.

And they’re not delaying production on Deathly Hallows. The actors will still be well within the standard Hollywood “teenager” age range by the time they finish playing 17-year-olds in the final film.

So I can understand being annoyed, but I don’t understand the letter-writing, the petitions, the plans to boycott the film — yes, there are fans who intend to boycott the film if they have to wait for it.

*sigh* I’d better go over to Newsarama and see how crazy the thread about Final Crisis #4 being delayed 2 weeks has gotten. Actually, no, I shouldn’t. I should get some sleep instead.

P.S. Anyone else think that “HP Rebellion” would be a great name for a computer?